Last week Sharon said he was prepared to make "painful concessions" for peace. Nothing could be further from the truth, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem On Monday Ariel Sharon formally unveiled his new 23-minister cabinet. It is "the most right-wing, most nationalistic, most extreme and most war-like government Israel has ever had," says veteran Israeli peace campaigner, Uri Avnery. A glance around the portfolios suggests he is right. Seated in the Defence Ministry is Shaul Mofaz. As army chief of staff he was the architect of Israel's Defensive Shield offensive last year: a military reconquest that according to organisations like Human Right Watch and Amnesty International committed war crimes in the West Bank. In May he proposed a similar solution for Gaza but was reined in by his defence minister. Israel's current operations in the Strip suggest Mofaz will proceed as a politician from where he left off as a commander. In charge of the critical settlement ministries for housing and transport are leaders of the ultra-right National Religious Party and National Union, Effi Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman. Settlers themselves, Eitam avers Jews have a God-given right to the West Bank and that "Palestinian states" should be established in the Sinai Peninsula and Jordan. Lieberman is more of an old-style territorial colonialist, and believes "there is nothing undemocratic about transfer." Plying them with funds will be Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. His neo-liberal remedies for rescuing the Israeli economy based on tax cuts and privatisation are unlikely to make much of a dent in the enormous state subsidies required for "strengthening the pioneering endeavor of settling the entire country", and above all in the occupied territories. Presiding over all is Sharon, bound by "government guidelines" that are as long and winding as his road to peace. In his maiden address to the new Israeli parliament on 27 February he said the priorities of his government would be Israel's economic crisis and healing the rift between religion and state. As for the peace process, he promised his coalition partners that "before undertaking practical negotiations toward a political agreement -- should it include the establishment of a Palestinian state -- the topic will be discussed and decided upon by the government." It is easy to see why. Three of the four parties that make up his government (including his own Likud movement) are doctrinally opposed to a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River while the fourth, Tommy Lapid's Shinnui Party, has ruled out any Palestinian entity as long as Yasser Arafat remains Palestinian leader. In other words, should even a "Palestinian state under limited conditions" come to pass during his watch as prime minister, Sharon's government will fall apart. His game plan is to ensure that moment of truth never arrives. He believes it can be perpetually postponed not only because he is predicating all movement in the peace process on the Palestinians ending "terrorism and incitement", making "far-reaching reforms and replacing its current leadership". Nor even because he is now placing such impossible conditions on the Palestinian leadership that it renounce, in advance, "the groundless demand for the right of return" and concede that Jerusalem is "the united and undivided capital of Israel". Rather, his confidence is buoyed by the belief that this vision of long-term interim containment in the West Bank and Gaza is now shared by the American administration: that if regime change and military occupation is permissible for Iraq, then why not for Palestine? The confidence may not be misplaced. On 27 February President Bush took time out from the war against Iraq to take a brief look at the Arab- Israeli conflict. At a dinner in Washington he spoke the rhetoric of peace but couched the process in terms that could have been written by Sharon. Yes, he expects Israel to "support the creation of a viable Palestinian state" but only after the "terror threat is removed and security improves". "Settlement activity in the occupied territories must end" once "progress is made toward peace". Above all -- as far as Sharon is concerned -- Bush hinged a "new stage for Middle East peace" on "success in Iraq", a reordering of the region that will take months, perhaps years. For Sharon the second part of each of those sentences annuls the commitment stated in the first. The Palestinian leadership, Arabs and the EU all believe the two must come in concert otherwise peace, statehood and withdrawal won't come at all. Other Palestinians are urging their leaders to spend a little less time on waiting for an international rescue and a little more on reforming their governance, supporting their people and drumming some order into the Palestinian resistance. Faced with the storm gathering over Iraq, they believe that unless some degree of coherence and unity is achieved between the various wings of the Palestinian struggle it is a wholly open question which will endure longer: Sharon's new government or what remains of the Palestinian Authority.
